[5] Since its founding, JHU aimed to draw influence from the German educational system, knowledge of which Wood was able to mention in his application.
[1] In academic terms, Wood appears to have focused his energies on growing the German Department at JHU over and above his own research.
As such, he "saw the department that he had built as the proper combination of the German scholarly tradition adapted to a specifically American setting".
At the ninth annual meeting of the AFS in 1897, Wood presented a paper titled 'Poe's Fall of the House of Usher: A Study in Comparative Literature and Folk-lore'.
[9] Wood was made a Ritter dritter Klasse des königlich preußischen Ordens Roter Adler (Knight Third Class of the Royal Prussian Order of the Red Eagle) by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1910.
This was in recognition of Wood's contribution to German studies in the US, but it may also have reflected the connections between the von Kretschman family and the royal court.